Poetry Magazine Marilyn B Bates

Marilyn B. Bates

USA

Len Roberts, who endorsed Marilyn Bates' book, Mixed Blood said of her:
"Marilyn Bates doesn't flinch from her and our frail human condition, and
I love the gutsy way she dares to confront these frailties with
wonderfully surprising images and rhythmical word mastery. Seeming
ordinary domestic scenes, like cooking or waiting in line at the grocery
store, suddenly explode with the extraordinary facts of our lives, such
as heart surgery or trying to speak with a voice box--and she weaves the
two together with seamless art. I applaud her emotional courage and I
applaud even more her balanced rhythms and jolting images, her fine
poetry, which express her deeply human condition."

Marilyn Bates, author of Mixed Blood, is a graduate of Carnegie-Mellon
University and teacher-consultant with the Western Pennsylvania Writing
Project at the University of Pittsburgh. An invited reader at the James
Wright Poetry Festival, her poetry has been anthologized in And What
Great Beast: Poems at the End of the Century. She was appointed by Sam
Hazo, Director of the International Poetry Forum, as a "Poet in Person" in
the Pittsburgh schools and serves on the Forum's Advisory Board. Her
work has appeared in The Pennsylvania Review, Pembroke Magazine, the Palo
Alto Review, Plainsongs, Poets-On, Verve and Iris, with work forthcoming
in SUNY's Via,. Essays have appeared in The Journal of Poetry Therapy, The
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Carnegie Mellon Magazine. She has read her
poetry on NPR's Prosody, a production of WYEP, as well as Grace
Cavaleri's The Poet and the Poem, APR.

Marilyn Bates attributes her love for the outdoors, with which she begins
this collection, to those quiet afternoons of shelling peas under the
osage orange trees with her grandmother or digging in her own small patch
next to her father's garden. Their psyches, delicately connected like
roots beneath the soil, bear fruit in this poetry. Most painful of all
experiences is the illness which linked her to her father. As she speaks
to those with whom her blood is mixed, the writer depicts a woman in all
phases of life--lover, wife, mother--one who emerges as tough-minded and
independent.

Sunday and I cook for a week,

squeezed between treadmills
and exercycles, drop oregano, onion,
basil in the pot, a hint of olive oil,
the good fat, the doctor said
when he pressed my chest, asked
how it felt after he cracked it in half
to stop the litany of my heart,
one that runs through my head today
while I separate sinews from chicken,
wonder if the highway to my heart
will clog with a blob, thick as gristle
I feed down a drain, swift as one
that tapped my bloated lungs, floating
like a fetus in its nebular sac.

My timer ticks like a monitor tracking
the errant heart as I dry-beat the chicken,
drop it in the pot, hot as a fever
that came when the leg wouldn't heal,
one they took the good veins from,
trussed up, skin swelling between sutures
till they put out the fire with the big drugs,
a family of myceins, dripping from
the yellow-stained bag, yellow as saffron
sprinkled in the rice where the kernels swell
like my ankles, hoping I won't drown
in my own soup.

It Could Drive You Crazy

You stand there trying to make sense to the mechanic.
He points to a space under your car,
mumbles about the universal joint.
Your own joints turn to rubber,
blood sugar dropping you into insulin shock.

You pop coins in the Coke machine,
your throat opening to a chug of sweet.
You think of all the booze you guzzled,
smooth as oil into the crankcase.
A vice around your lungs steals your breath
while you wait for sugar to stop this skid into panic.

You think about the transplant news--
Doctor Starzl's baboon liver,
moonfaced kids on steroids.
Now they're going for six organs at a time,
and you know you'd grab for it,
just to stay alive.

The sugar wrenches you back to the mechanic saying,
The axle's bent. You hit something?
You think, Yeah, I ran into something,
ponder the curb of your own life,
all the turns you missed,
the one-way alleys of romance,
the dead-end husbands,
the diabetic's shortcut life.
I could order the part, he says.

Nah! Just fill it up, you say
and keep on driving.

Footwork

Your father cut you loose, shoeless for the summer,
feet flapping on the hard mud, your long hair buzz cut
for working rows of August corn. Sheaves cracked
your hands as you filled the canvas bag, shoulders burning

under the long-sleeved shirt that kept the flies away.
After, you forked a hot meal, a day's pay for a day's
hard work. Those feet carried you everywhere--
from the dentist, who cut swollen tonsils from your throat,

to the Isaly's store to trade the nickle bus ride home
for an ice cream cone. When you sold lace to night ladies
who never showed their faces in town, a stock boy's wage
earned that first store-bought suit, stiff in the cardboard box.

Years later you hawked the New York streets, black wing tips
glinting off the steps of Gimbel's and Saks, feet carrying you
to the finery of gabardine and hound's tooth, pearl
and velvet buttons. Your adam's apple bobbed above

the new cravat and Kuppenheimer suit. Seams of silk
stockings ran with the luxury of liquor, like thick
black welts smoothed onto legs of women who bought
your lingerie. When sugar-thick blood felled your legs,

you stood straight on two fake legs, proud of your flawless
gait. Still dapper in the suede suit, you took that last trip
to Vegas, pulled out of the drive in the stick shift
Opel to make the three-point turn without a glitch.

Rehab

Hard sitting in the waiting room, there
for a simple sprain, spanning a bench
where patients with pale, tissue-paper faces
wait, their hair awry, as if tossed in wind
then suddenly frozen into ridiculous peaks,
their casts at impossible angles.
A thumb unmet by a coffee cup juts out
into the space of the rehab wing.
Medics, lean-boned and fit, handle old limbs
like archaeologists unearthing clay pots,
checking for invisible fissures, whisking
away bone dust with sable brushes.

Hard watching she who once twirled
for Balanchine try to connect the therapist's
words with the order to take a step,
pixels of her memory erased, spirit battered
by the slow growth of bones refusing
to hold her frame upright. She stares open-
mouthed, inches forward on a walker,
half wanting to move to the dance
of the impatient orderly who taps his toes
on the yellow linoleum in front of her,
half wanting to sink into something soft,
a wheelchair? She has already forgotten.

Hard not to stare when some unthinking aide
wheels another from the hospital, draped
with a short blanket barely covering legs
halved by the surgeon's saw. No war-time
bravado, no fireside stories, no purple hearts
grace stumps felled by "sugar." Someone
has forgotten to shroud him with a swath
of cloth, hide him from the public haunt
of the waiting room, where I sit buried in poetry,
knowing too much of where I'm headed.

Havanas

The man in front of me at the Safeway
wears a straw cap, a weave recalling days
when Cuba was just a step from a cruise ship
and campesinas sold thin brimmed hats
like the one he wears. So oddly dressed
for ninety degrees, his linen jacket drapes
over a rake of a body, smothers like wool.

Ahead, the line stumbles. Someone's
in a rag about the register tape, a torn piece
caught in the cog, clerks with hands like nettles.
The man shrugs shoulders, thick-browed
in questions until I coax him into conversation,
with my prattle about the heat, the wait.

>From his pocket he fingers a voicebox,
holds it to his throat, makes it talk,
unleashes a torrent of words I can't comprehend.
I don't know what to say or do, but nod
as if I understand. I try to think instead
of the greenery of the campo, far-off plains
where grass grows to make the hat he wears.

The line budges like a rusty hinge.
He loads the moving belt with milk,
lots of milk, bananas, mangoes, ears of corn.
I think of kernels stuck inside his throat
in that place where part of him is missing,
imagine his slender fingers caressing
Havanas that swallowed his voice, trapped
his tongue inside a bell without a song.

(and here's another "blood"poem)

Bloodfruit

I'd write a poem about cherries, how the sun
opened little windows of light on the dark red

globes, but they'd remind me of you, too drunk to spray
the trees, half a bottle stashed beneath the junipers,

cankers budding in the fruit, how I learned to bite
into them carefully, watching for a worm, splitting

the good fruit apart at the cleft for juice dribbled
over ice, pressing their flesh with a hand crank

until it ran red as blood you spilled when your truck
upended in the ditch, you walking home,

staggering the stairs, a window of skin opened
on your forehead, how you cursed at chores, growling

under the roar of the mower as you ran across
the garden in a rage, beheading cauliflower,

me, scooping up the latest lopped head, looking
at the clean white lobes, wondering if this is how

your brain looked before it sopped up too much hooch,
how lightning split the tree, like my heart when

other women took you between their breasts,
your mouth sweeted on their nipples like cherries.